[lbo-talk] On Chomsky's remark about Israeli society

[Carrol Cox]

On 9/30/2011 8:26 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Sep 30, 2011, at 9:18 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
>> Analogies are always inexact, and every situation is
>> sui-generis, but I can't think of a *better* analogy to
>> Israel than South Africa.
>
> As someone pointed out recently - where did I see this? ah the combination of the Internet and my aging memory - with apartheid, SA wanted black labor. Israel doesn't want Pal labor - just land. That's a difference.

Indeed. About 30 years ago I had a conversation with a Palestinian on 
this very subject: I asked him if Israel _needed_ Palestinian labor, & 
he wasn't sure. The difference can be deadly! And though I believe he 
eventually softened in his politics, Darwish had a scary poem that 
raised another common analogy.: "Where will we go after the last 
frontier?" One of th e lines if I remember it correctly was "The earth 
is closing in on us." The poem was in a book entitled "Victims of a 
Map," which I reviewed for Arabs Studies Quarterly.

Carrol